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London’s growth as a city in its early days was rooted in and furthered by the strategic location of food markets, primarily on main routes running into its core. The town’s early leaders easily comprehended that the efficient supply of food was essential if it was to grow, but even more pivotal was their understanding that the soil throughout the region was some of the most fertile in the world. It was inevitable that they couldn’t view London’s future success without a strong link to the land.

Many have observed that over the last few decades that connection was severed. We have now placed ourselves in a situation where the majority of Londoners never visit a farm or even comprehend the realities of the growing cycles and the crops harvested. Why should they? Such realities never emerge from the city’s plan. But if London, like many of our cities, is to renew itself, it must discover those places where this urban-rural separation developed.

We have become unhinged from what earlier London citizens saw as a vital part of who and what London is. We have this insatiable desire to bring green into the city and put asphalt in the country. We have established lives that swirl around only the city.

Around the world, municipalities are in the process of rediscovering their rural environs. The reasons for this are many, yet in London we are only at the very beginning of that evolution.

In many ways the routes into the city are still populated by food stores: huge supermarkets that offer everything from leeks to lawn furniture. But the key difference from times past is the food itself. We’re much more likely to get fruit from Chile, grapes from California, or milk ingredients from China. In fact, China makes one billion dollars a year from shipping its food to our country. There are ecological and economic problems with this kind of food system.

Losing our sense of place, we have also lowered our sense of productivity and capacity that would naturally come with a burgeoning food and agricultural sector. We have lost touch with that possibility. But there might be some innovative ways we could get it back, methods that would link the farm and the city once again.

It’s time for our leaders to develop a new kind of language. They may no longer find it helpful to think of urban as “industry” and rural as “agriculture” but need to consider how to support economic and livelihood systems that bring out the best of both dimensions. It’s time to stop talking about “sectors” and pay increased attention to regional economies, to move away from traditional divisions that have kept us from discovering more holistic ways of bringing the potential of the land to the dynamic of the city, and vice versa.

London is one such city crying out for some kind of food strategy that not only expands the benefits of health, culture, alleviation of hunger, and food safety, but enhances our economic capacity as well, creating jobs and providing cheaper foodstuffs.

Over the decades an enterprise model has arisen that eventually saw supermarkets eclipse food markets, thereby permitting the harsher realities of the global food conglomerates to affect our way of life. Yet there is a strong urge in the city and the country to further the potential of fresh food markets, winter and summer, in London and region. We are still waiting for some kind of plan that would put resources behind that kind of local food supply chain.

London has many challenges before it, but this should never have been one of them. Rich, rural lands have been with us from our beginnings as a community, but at some point public policies and corporate practices lured us away from what would ultimately have been a healthier, more safe and stable, lucrative and job-creating food supply system.

London was once a city of the land, as its founders envisioned, and can be again in ways that would prepare us for the next century. What is required is a menu, listing research, citizen buy-in, and infrastructure support, all framed by a strategic plan that would see London restoring itself to prosperity partially through the land it is founded upon.

Glen Pearson is co-director of the London Food Bank and a former Liberal MP for the riding of London North Centre. pearsg9@gmail.com

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Where to find new book

A Place For Us is available in print at Oxford Book Shop, www.amazon.com and local libraries. The e-book and audio book versions are free for downloading at www.glenpearson.ca.

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The London Free Press is publishing four excerpts from a new book, titled A Place for Us: Thoughts on a City in Transition, by our columnist Glen Pearson. In it, Pearson argues Londoners must do things differently, particularly act more cohesively, if they are to get past the limitations their city is experiencing. The book excerpts are running weekly on Saturdays in the Comment section.